School’s in!

“Respect your parents. They passed school without Google!”

Anonymous

OK – so it is college rather than school, we’ve actually been back for nearly three weeks now – and September 2021 is not long for this world either.

Apart from that… you get the idea!

I promised that I would write something about going back to college – as in actually ‘going back to college’ rather than just starting another ‘virtual’ term from the comforts of my studio at home…

…and here I am!

The College decreed that for the new academic year we should all be back face to face in the classroom and lecture hall. This is entirely understandable, given that students had started displaying (along with gratitude that their health interests were being foregrounded) some discontent that they were not getting the full college experience even though they were still being asked to pay for it. In the light of this pressure the College probably had little choice in the matter.

The decision would doubtless not have been particularly contentious had it not been for the subsequent emergence of the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus. This unpleasantness has inevitably ramped up the risk level again and left us all considerably more concerned as to the best course of action going forward.

Still – face to face it is for now – but with a plethora of precautions to try to keep things safe. Masks must be worn inside buildings – including in the classrooms – and vaccine passports are required for access to sports and some other facilities, though not for the cafeterias and bookshops.

I am all for appropriate precautions and particularly keen to remain healthy myself. There are implications for teaching, however. We are obliged to wear a mask when teaching unless there is at least two metres between us and the nearest student – in which case we can unmask. Two of the spaces in which I operate are large enough that I can – gratefully – go maskless. My other classroom is a pokey little hole in which I have to deliver an eighty minute class once a week. Fun it is not!

My Chair is very keen that we should also make provision for any students who cannot attend classes in person – either because they have had to quarantine or because they do not feel comfortable being in such public spaces. There are – of course – methods by which classes could be simultaneously streamed if required, but this demands additional equipment and configuration which the department – and College – have thus far proved slow to provide. I don’t mean to be awkward, but I certainly have no intention of teaching the classes twice – once for those who are present and again for those who are not.

Oh well! No doubt we will stumble through the term in our usual manner. The odds on the term ending in the same manner that it has begun must reasonably long, I would have thought.